Due to court imposed blockades millions of Pirate Bay users rely on proxy websites to access their favorite BitTorrent site. Approximately 5% of all Pirate Bay users now visit the site through a proxy address, and thanks to "The Pirate Patch" app they can now do so using the familiar thepiratebay.se and .org domains.

After several large ISPs in the UK and the Netherlands were ordered to block The Pirate Bay this year, reverse proxy sites popped up left and right.

These sites allow users to access the BitTorrent site through an alternate domain name. The UK Pirate Party operates the most visited proxy site and they alone get more than a million visits a month.

In total, more than 5% of all Pirate Bay users now access the site through a proxy.

While these proxies work well they don’t allow people to access the site through the official thepiratebay.se domain. This means that referrals through Google and meta-search engines such as Torrentz no longer work. At least, not without a bit of effort.

Those who know their way around a computer can edit their “hosts file” to link the original Pirate Bay domain to one of the many reverse proxies. All they have to do is add a few lines and The Pirate Bay becomes available again via its usual address.

To simplify this process The Pirate Patch was coded by the Dutch-based Pirate Bay user Qarizma. The Windows application automatically adds the required entries into the hosts file through a simple batch script.

“The real domain is blocked where I live, and it gives me a kick when I browse The Pirate Bay on the original URL. It just feels better,” Qarizma told TorrentFreak in a comment.

The application has three options. People can install it, remove the changes that were made, or ask for an update if it’s no longer working. Qarizma told TorrentFreak that he maintains and updates the list of working proxy IP-addresses himself.

Pirate Patch

The Pirate Patch is Open Source and the batch file is accessible by extracting the .exe file. While the application works as advertised, some anti-virus software may block it because of the edits it makes to the hosts system file, although the same edits can easily be made manually.

Initiatives such as The Pirate Patch show that while these blockades may stop some people from accessing a site, the really determined have plenty of options.

Proof of the ineffectiveness of censorship attempts was recently highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.